Hey guys, I completely suck at computers so please bear with me. About 2 months ago my mouse started "sticking" for lack of a better term. It has made my computer un-usable at times, super frustrating. The mouse was old so I bought a new one and the problem has persisted. Now I realize that my keyboard is doing the same thing like when I'm typing and stuff, but it happens more with my mouse. I recognize that a little bit of this is normal, but it's been very extreme. It also came about rather abruptly so I wasn't sure if I contracted a virus or running a new program that is hogging memory or what.

I've run my anti-virus multiple times and everything looks clean. I've defraged my hard drive and done a few other computer clean up things but they haven't helped. My hard drive capacity was down to about 3GB of 130 but i cleaned some stuff up so now it's at about 17GB free. not sure if that matters. I reinstalled drivers for my mouse, didn't help.

This computer is kind of old and wasn't great when i bought it, but i'd like to hold of for at least another year before getting a new one. I'd also like to avoid reinstalling windows or anything that's going to make me set everything back up from scratch. I was thinking of adding some ram, I've done that in the past with desktops and it's been a quick fix for a little extra speed for awhile.

Anyway, if you've read this far, thank you. Has anyone encountered a similar problem and know of anything i can do to fix it?

Thanks,
numbnuts

Just to elaborate it's a dell inspiron 530 running vista with a 2ghz intel processor and 2GB of memory.

Mine would do something like this where the mouse would freeze for a second, once or twice every minute. I noticed this coincided with the hard drive being active.

I replaced the HD and it's been fine ever since.

Try to plug-in your mouse via PS/2 port not USB with the adapter that usually comes with the device.

Sup bro. I'm not a hardware guru or anything, but maybe a little more computer savvy than yourself, so take it fwiw. Few points:

Mouses do have limited life. I think standard ones last about 1 million clicks. After that they start to not respond. Perhaps the new one you bought sucks? If it's cheap, might have problems right out of the box? Is it more likely to respond when you click hard? If you answered no to all those, it sounds like the problem might be with your USB port. Try plugging it into another USB port.

If that doesn't work...

Memory or CPU problems may cause unresponsiveness from your mouse/keyboard. But it should be relatively easy to determine if your memory or CPU is being maxed out (your PC specs are fine btw). Just check out the Windows Task Manager. Unless a lot of other strange stuff is happening, you probably don't have a malicious virus.

As far as I know, hard drive space should not be causing a problem like this, unless you are completely out of space. Being down to 3GB is actually pretty low, but if you cleaned up files and then defraged, and the problem still persists...

I think the problem is most likely with the USB ports.

Do you notice any patterns that cause the problem? Like when you are running a particular program, it happens more often? When you are online? Anything like that?